02
Outer Seed Shadow
(OSS) 2012-2017
OSS is an ongoing series of community base public art interventions in the form of geopolitical gardens that materialize social ecosystems using different plant species as representatives of social groups to address social and environmental justice. For its first edition immigrants living in Manhattan were interviewed to design the garden, resulting in an “impossible “ garden that was kept alive thanks to a series of community workshops with different local groups and organization in downtown Manhattan.
Conceived as a living sculpture, each garden serves as a platform for public programing, where communities can share and create knowledge.
Over eight years OSS gardens have developed programs addressing nutrition, food literacy, cultural coexistence, race, self-sufficiency, memory building and wellbeing.
In 2017 OSS Project Inc. incorporated as a non-profit organization whose mission is to connect communities with artists to create gardens as places to empower, celebrate and reclaim identity and knowledge, using design, urban farming, storytelling, educational programming and community building as means to dismantle systemic and structural is- sues of social inequity and environmental justice. Through community-led open calls, artists and designers are invited to work in partnership with communities, resulting in collaborative creative processes in the form of gardens that serve as platforms for community self-development.